The Reign of the Brown Magician. Lawrence Watt-Evans

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      She stopped in mid-sentence and stared; her mouth fell open.

      Prossie asked, “What is it?” She hurried to the kitchen door and looked.

      Not realizing at first that Amy was looking out the back, it took her a moment to see what was wrong; she wasted several seconds scanning the kitchen itself, and saw nothing out of the ordinary. At last, though, her gaze reached the window.

      “Oh, my…” she began.

      “Someone better tell the Air Force men,” Amy said. She turned and ran for the front door to do just that, leaving Prossie staring wide-eyed out the back, staring at the men in purple space suits climbing down a rope-ladder that seemed to hang from empty sky.

      Chapter Six

      Samuel Best sometimes wondered whether his name had helped him in his career in Imperial Intelligence. Nobody would admit such a thing, of course, but sometimes he wondered whether, on some level, people expected more of him because of his name, and chose him for tough assignments because he was, after all, the Best.

      Not that he necessarily believed he actually was the best; to think such a thing could lead to over­confidence, and that could easily be fatal.

      He did try to be good at his work, though, and in this case that had resulted in delays that had irritated the hell out of that officious twit, John Bascombe, Under-Secretary for Interdimensional Affairs.

      Best didn’t much care. Bascombe might be an up-and-coming politician, he might be able to ruin Best’s life—but screwing up a field assignment could get a man killed. Better to annoy one’s superiors and live than to do as one’s told and die.

      It had just seemed to be common sense to insist on speaking to anyone in the Empire who had actually been in this Shadow place, and it wasn’t his fault if the surviving crewmen of I.S.S. Ruthless had been reassigned and scattered.

      It was too bad no one from Colonel Carson’s squad had made it back alive, but they hadn’t; there were only the six men from Ruthless.

      Not that they had been able to tell him much, in any case; they had only been there for about twenty minutes, and in an area hundreds of miles from his intended point of arrival.

      Still, it was useful to know about the heavier gravity, the lower-than-optimum oxygen content of the atmosphere, the blue-shifted sunlight, the pseudoterrestrial ecology, the appearance of a feudal social structure—and the clothing. Best had no desire to be obvious; he wasn’t about to go in in uniform.

      The squad sent to the other universe, the place called Earth, could make their own decisions; he and his boys were going in in the closest approximation of local costume they could manage.

      This meant that the Earth squad went first, of course—Bascombe hadn’t been willing to wait.

      That was fine with Best; he wasn’t eager to be the first to try this trick of climbing through a space-warp on a rope ladder. And the fact that the Empire only had one space-warp generator operational at the moment—though he knew that more were under construction, a fact he was not supposed to know—meant that he and his three underlings couldn’t go anywhere until the Earth squad was through, and the generator shut down, recalibrated, and re-started.

      It seemed to be working, though; having finally approved the preparations, he stood behind Bascombe and to the side, hand shading his eyes, and watched through the thick tinted glass as the four space suited figures vanished into the blinding white glare of the space-warp field.

      A fifth figure, also suited, emerged from the glare and waved to the control room.

      “They’re through,” one of the engineers said.

      “Good,” Bascombe said. “Then get this thing shut down and open the warp to Shadow’s universe.”

      “But, sir,” someone protested, “If you do that, you’ll cut off the men on Earth—the ladder will be sheared off, and we won’t be able to retrieve them.”

      “Roll the damn ladder up,” Bascombe said, “and then use it to get Best, here, and his crew, to Shadow’s world. Then you can re­open the warp to Earth. We’ll do four-hour shifts hanging that ladder in each universe.”

      “Give them another hour, sir,” Best said. “It’ll take me that long to get my men ready.”

      Bascombe turned to glare at him, looked down at the phony peasant garb Best wore, then shrugged.

      “Forty minutes,” he said. “I want you and your men in the staging area, suited and ready to go, in forty minutes.”

      “Yes, sir,” Best said. He saluted, and stood at attention as Bascombe left the room.

      “What an idiot,” an engineer muttered when the door had swung shut.

      Best didn’t bother to reply aloud, but his own opinion was the same.

      * * * *

      “It didn’t work,” Pel said, glaring at the dead dog. It had stopped twitching.

      “Well, O Great One,” Athelstan said, “did we not say that we knew not the way of it?”

      “You said you thought you could, if you had enough power,” Pel countered.

      “Nay, rather, said we that we thought we might, had we the power,” Athelstan corrected him. “’Twould seem we were mistaken. Ne’er did we promise.”

      For a moment, Pel just stared at the dog. Then he sighed. “I know you didn’t promise,” he said. “So you can’t do it, you don’t know how—but doesn’t anyone know? Shadow knew, right?”

      “Yes, it does…that is, rather, it did.” Athelstan stared at the dog as well.

      After a moment’s silence, the wizard bestirred himself and said, “Hark, then, Master—we know the theory of old, as we told you, handed down from master to apprentice since the earliest years of Shadow’s use of fetches. Our knowledge thereof must, we see, be deficient in some wise. Perchance, though, were we to study an ensample of the practice of necromantic art, understanding might be gained thereby.”

      Pel turned and looked at the wizard.

      “What?” he said.

      Athelstan blinked, then said, speaking slowly and clearly, “O Great One, had we the chance to study, and to test, perhaps to destruction, one that had in fact been resurrected from death, might we then gain the understanding we lack?”

      Pel stared at him.

      “Your fetches, Lord,” Athelstan explained, gesturing at the pair that stood guard by the door.

      Pel blinked, then glanced at his unmoving servants, then back at Athelstan.

      Something twinged, twitched, tickled at him somehow. He paused.

      Something felt odd, and slightly wrong, and he wasn’t sure what it was or where it was or even whether it was internal or external. Something was disturbed, somehow.

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